Category: Partition

People do get excited when they buy a new laptop. I have friends who bought laptop only to watch movies, so the requirement varies from one person to another. They do plan about the hard drive space and how to use it maximum. Some purchase laptop with 500GB hard drive and expect to use 500GB completely. Dear users, that’s not possible, because a small portion of the hard drive space will be consumed by the installed OS in C drive and a different partition D drive for Recovery. The main reason behind writing this article is, some people delete the recovery partition which comes along with unit when you purchase operating system along with the laptop (OEM). Initially user may not understand the use of this recovery partition. But once OS get crashed and when they search for solutions, they will realize that this Recovery Partition was very important. So do not delete the Recovery Partition to save space in your hard drive.

Recovery Partition

Why Recovery Partition?

Recovery partition which normally comes as D drive, is a partition used to reinstall OEM image of operating system when it gets crashed or corrupted. Most of the manufacturers like Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, Lenovo creates the recovery partition.

Example: You purchased a Dell laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed. There will be a D drive with recovery partition for Windows 8. In future if there is any issue related to OS and if you have to reinstall the Windows OS, you don’t have to purchase a new Windows 8 software as you can easily restore it from this recovery partition multiple times.

I would like to share another example, as users can go confused.

Example: Same case as above, but no issue with operating system. From Windows 8, you upgraded to Windows 10. Here the operating system changes, but not the recovery partition. After upgrading to Windows 10, if you face any critical issue with OS, then you have to reinstall the OS. But now it will not reinstall Windows 10 as recovery partition has Windows 8. In this case if you reinstalling OS using recovery partition, it will roll back to Windows 8.

How to use a Recovery Partition?

The soul remains the same as the purpose of all recovery partition by any manufacturer are the same. But the execution is different for different products.

The first and foremost thing that a user need to do before performing a Windows reinstallation is taking a backup up of the existing data in hard drive. Once the OS is reinstalled, the data in that particular partition will be permanently deleted. But in today’s world that won’t be a major issue, as it is easy to recover partition using tools.

Still I recommend you to take back up as it is the safest option.

The usage of recovery partition depends on the situation in which you are. If you have to reinstall Windows due to some low system performance or other registry issues, you can access recovery partition after booting into Windows. You just need to type Recovery and select the options according to the instructions. But if you are in a situation where the system does not boot into Windows, then you have to access recovery partition from BIOS. Different laptop brands have different way of accessing this recovery partition.

Example: For HP laptops, it by tapping on F11 key to get into recovery environment. Whereas for Dell laptops, you have to press and hold F8 key. The steps are also different. You get the help manual from the respective websites for performing the recovery.

Summary

Never ever delete the recovery partition from your hard drive as it is very helpful when you need to perform an OS reinstallation. Hope this article was useful to you for understanding the concept of Recovery partition and its advantages.